More like poor chefs. For a document everybody in the business pretty much sneers at, the Michelin Guide is a still an important gauge of a chef’s worth (maybe self-worth). Get a star, and a chef’s likely to post some humble tweet about the honor of it all; get dissed, and a chef will call Michelin biased, blind, or stupid, sometimes publicly.

For me, Michelin’s biggest crime isn’t the omissions or its fetish for grandeur—it’s the writing. I’m pretty sure the reviews were all originally written in French, then translated into English with the punctiliousness of a grad student. For instance, the kitchen at one-star NoMad “astonishes with its lot of elegant à la carte creations. It’s all deliciously tempting; so at the risk of becoming mired by indecision, just order.” Mission Chinese Food has “small tables piled high with such uniquely aggressive cooking that may yield delicious Shanghainese rice cakes tossed with thrice-cooked bacon.”

For any chef to hang his reputation on a rating from writers capable of that—to rephrase some anonymous Michelin writer, that astonishes.